Analyzing Trends in Summer Olympic Games Medals

Every four years (or two), the world holds its breath as individual humans represent whole countries through their mastery of a sport. We data scientists have analyzed the Summer Olympics from the year 1896 to 2016–yes, 120 years of the top athletes competing for the glory, and, perhaps more importantly, the gold.

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##Important DO BEFORE TURNING IN More criteria: Findings are woven together in a cohesive story, rather than presented as a list of distinct ideas.

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Original Data

This data hails from Kaggle from the games in Athens 1896 to Rio 2016; more recently, it was popularized through the weekly R challenge “Tidy Tuesday.” Until 1992, the Winter and Summer Games coincided in the same year, which results in odd data points like a Figure Skating victory slipping into the Summer Olympics data sets. Other aspects of the history of the Olympics include the existence and end to whole nations as the years progress. Examples include East and West Germany and the Soviet Union–as well as unrecognized independent territories such as Kosovo and Taiwan. Our team’s methodology to eliminate our own biases was to keep the data points that reflect 2016’s Olympic Games for sports measured and the countries recognized are universally agreed upon by the international community.

Filtered Data Sets

Female-only, medal-winning data:

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Felicia’s Graphs

1. Overall medals (gold, silver, and bronze) won by Olympians

In general, the net amount of medals won is favored by sports within which have multiple opportunities to medal. One example includes Athletics, also known as “Track and Field,” having multiple races, team relays, and field events for athletes to earn medals in. Other result by contrasting by gender shows both the lack of female inclusion for a significant period of time, reflecting gender dynamics over the decades, as well as sports that are more dominated by one gender. Synchronized Swimming, Rhythmic Gymnastics appear to only have female champions, while Wrestling, the Modern Pentathlon, Rugby, and Lacrosse appear to have majority male winners.

2. Olympic medal winning women’s heights and weights

Above is a graph that shows all the female athletes in one graph, showing a wide range of heights and weights of Olympians. However, due to the amount of sports, the graph itself is very noisy. To better understand the trends, the same data is compiled into four different categories.

The first category is “Holding an object”: These athletes are holding onto something, whether it is the reigns of a horse or a racket, they are armed.

The second is “Wearing protective gear.” The athletes in this category are wearing an extra layer designed for their sport to reduce injury.

The third is “In water.” As it sounds, these athletes are found in the water to compete.

Lastly, there is “Just self.” These athletes are not holding anything, wearing something meant to protect them, or are in the water.

3. World map showing the proportion of Olympic medal wins to participation in events

The map above adds depth to our understanding of Olympic medal winning countries. Previous maps show an extreme domination in the Olympics by the United States of America, but taking the wins in relation to total participation, other countries emerge as prolific medal winners as well. Russia, Finland, Germany, and China also tend to win more often when their athletes are competing. The United States still is at the highest level of medal wins. One other aspect to note are all the medals won by countries that no longer exist today, like the USSR and East and West Germany. This graph tells a more accurate story of where champions are from, but cannot wholly depict the wins every achieved in the world.

##Gabby’s Graph

##__4.

The map above gives us a basic idea of how many gold medals are earned per country in the olympics. It’s very obvious that the United States outnumber every other country by far with the second and third place countries having over 1000 less.As the numbers of gold medals won decrease, it becomes harder to distinguish the count. While this graph gives us an idea of what countries dominate the summer olympics, we have little details on what events they are winning them in.

##__5. Above is a series of 34 graphs, each graph represents a country that has won more than 20 gold medals, and displays what events they have received the gold medals in. These graphs give us a detailed look on the events that are winning the most gold medals for each country that we are looking at. These graphs allow us to compare and contrast the countries since they are all in one place, and easy to distinguish the sports because not only did we color code them, we included the names of them on the y-axis to make it easier. It’s interesting to see which countries have won gold medals in only one sport, and what sport that is. By the same token, these graphs are multipurposeful because they show us how many sports each country has won gold medals in, and the distribution of those medals as well.

##__6.

Above are two graphs dealing with a similar concept, looking at earned medals as a whole for the 10 highest winning countries. Previous graphs have only focused on gold medals, while these two graphs bring in all three medals, providing us with a bigger picture. The first graph, the plotly, displays the distribution of medals won by the top 10 countries. Since this graph is proportional we can compare the amount of medals earned by countries by the percentage distribution of each medal. The second graph, gives us similar information but doesn’t show the number of medals as proportions. Here we just see how many of each type of medal each of our top countries have won, in descending order. We can still somewhat estimate the proportion of each medal for each country but here we see which countries have the most medals once again.